Signs are often displayed in retail organizations to provide information such as a type of good for sale and the price of the good. Conventional signs are typically paper-based and static, and are often distributed electronically to individual stores from a remote location, such as corporate headquarters. Individual stores must then print the signs and display them in the appropriate paper sign holders. Accordingly, in order to reflect updated information, the existing sign displaying the old information must be replaced with a new sign that contains the updated information. A store associate must physically locate the appropriate sign located at a particular product display, or alternatively, locate the appropriate product when looking at the paper sign.
Replacing such signs throughout a store can require a significant number of man-hours depending upon the size of the facility and the frequency with which information is updated. This may require numerous individuals dedicated to the task of replacing signs throughout even a single facility, and retail organizations often dedicate large numbers of personnel to this process. This is, of course, magnified when a single enterprise has multiple facilities, as not only are more signs needed to be replaced, but there are significant logistical issues with delivering new signs to multiple locations. Moreover, when item descriptions and prices are changed manually, there is no assurance that the price displayed adjacent an item is the correct price, or even corresponds to the correct item.
An existing method of updating retail signs is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,473,146, to Goodwin, the disclosure of which is entirely incorporated herein by reference. However, this and other prior art methods require separate computer or systems to be located at the point of sale, and they do not provide an adequate ability to display several types of information on a single sign. They also do not allow for sign data to be stored and sent from corporate headquarters to merchandise display locations at a plurality of individual retail store locations, nor do they integrate the transmission of sign data for products that do not yet utilize an electronic display device with the transmission of sign data for products that are connected with electronic signs.
Currently, some retail organizations are implementing a signage practice based on electronic sign displays, whereby the administration and management of signs is accomplished by interfacing the network of signs with a server computer. The administration and management of the network of signs may be accomplished by a user interface, or pursuant to a set of instructions previously provided to the server computer. Each sign is notified by the server computer to retrieve the new content to be displayed on the sign and to gather local information and return it to the server. The server may also construct new content and instruct the sign to retrieve and display new or different content. The implementation of this signage practice based on electronic sign displays is likely to require a period of time during which the technology and the equipment is introduced gradually. This will require that both the existing paper-based sign process and the new electronic sign based process be used simultaneously, and there is therefore a need for a rational and reliable method for integrating the two processes.
The present disclosure describes attempts to solve one or more of the above-listed problems.